The Expanding Social Safety Net

Casey Mulligan

No 17654, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Inflation-adjusted spending on means-tested subsidies have increased sharply since 2007, and most of this growth was due to changes in eligibility rules, and increases in subsidies per eligible person, rather than increases in the number of people who would have been eligible under pre-recession subsidy rules. The non-elderly parts of the safety net have increased from about $10,000 per year of non- or under-employment by non-elderly household heads and spouses in 2007 to almost $15,000 per year in 2010, adjusted for inflation. From 2007 to 2010, inflation-adjusted safety net spending increased $35,000 for every added year of non-employment or under-employment. As a result, the average private returns to employment are substantially less than they were in 2007.

JEL-codes: E24 H31 H41 I38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
Note: EFG LS PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w17654.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:17654

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w17654

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().